Hey there,
I’m a bigot.

How you doing?

I’m a bigot because at the end of the day, I have so little time for many if not all Americans. From threats by ex-marines to be taken out of a Detroit bowling alley and beaten to death, to rich Texans asking me “What does the world think of us” to being the only white guy put in the short queue in Chicago’s O’Hare airport to being dragged kicking and screaming abuse from a late night wal-mart after being told my passport was not valid ID, for the goddamn tenth time that evening.

I’ve gone beyond Bowie’s timid coked up bullshit of being afraid of Americans. No, I’m running close to a full Hate-On.

That was never what I intended though. There was a time when I loved America, when as a twelve year old boy, stepping onto American soil felt like “coming home”.

Yet here we are, 2008.

The Directors lied to us.
The books misled us.

Telephones do not have TV screens with which to watch your friend in Japan talk.

War is not just a terrible memory and we do not live in a nuclear wasteland.

Toecutter and friends do not run our highways.

Kubrick promised us Space-Tourism.

And there are no flying cars.

If only because, where we’re going, we won’t need roads.

In the end, I meet each American with an open-mind, the same way you do a new child, hoping beyond hope that this one is sane, intelligent and has a clear worldview. I am, I guess, the armchair bigot.

I apologize for letting reality affect me – but I do hate America. I do pledge death to America. Granted, I have a greater hate for China and can only wish both England and Russia slip burning into the sea. But still, America, not since Ancient Rome has such a genocidal misery inducing evil existed.

Bring on the rapture.

Let’s have that apocalypse.

Let me be sipping a zombie on my roof when the missiles start falling.

If only because – yes – we fucked up – and now as a bacteria screaming across the yoghurt that is Earth – at least give us the strength to wear those white robes and stab that blade deep into our guts as behind us, sense brings the sword down fast toward our necks.

Hope springs eternal.

But I do maintenance in my building. I’ve seen what shits people are. Provide bins they put their rubbish on top of them. Provide an area for rubbish, they’ll stand on the steps and throw their bags off them – so they burst and all that’s left is a steaming rotting slagheap of trash. Put some furniture in the hallway for moving, they’ll steal it. They get a new bed? They’ll just fuck their boxspring and mattress into the hallway without telling us. They stub their cigarettes out on windowsills, the carpet, hide half drunk beers in electricity boxes so they fester. They are worse than the worst racist nightmare cliché the world perpetuates about gypsies.

They are nothing but animals.
And some of them work in banks.

So in essence, having lived this microcosm, the spring is dead. Tires and tampons clog the sucking weed drenched mud that used to be clear water.

Then there is Henry.

I am, I admit, an old punk. Insofar as I’m not a teenager anymore and had the blessed grace to be musically raised by an anarchist sister who follows the ethic more than any fucker with a Mohawk and ‘UK Subs’ T-shirt.

I like ‘Black Flag’ – I don’t love them. Give me ‘Paranoid Visions’ any day.

I quite like ‘The Rollins Band’ – don’t love them. Frankly, I’d rather be blissed out to ‘Electric Wizard’.

Yet I love Henry Rollins. He has that human facet that makes him feel like a member of the gang, an old friend you’re watching stomp the world stage who sometimes you buy a ticket to affectionately watch.

It’s not so much the concept of what Rollins is doing; it’s not so much how he’s doing it. It’s just the person. It’s kind of like how I don’t like Poppy Z Brite books or Warren Ellis’ across the board crap, but I love the people behind it all.

I hate the word nice. Even though I use it all the time. I want to fucking stab every motherfucker who says “Noice” in that voice in the fucking face, with a fucking hammer. Yet, there is something nice about listening to an intelligent and wise American talk about life, the world and everything. Something that soothes the inner bigot and reminds you that yes, we’re all just people fumble-fucking in the dark that is the time before death.

It was a spoken word gig. He walks on stage, strikes his singing pose and lets the machine gun that is his hollow pointed personality loaded voice go. And it is good.

Disarming. Because there is something very warming about watching him slam his open hand into the air as he describes traveling to Islamabad and say to the memory of some native “Hi! I’m Henry!”. Something incredibly human and endearing.

If you’re going to a Rollins spoke word gig, you’re obviously intelligent enough not to hear anything you don’t already know. That is, unless you’re not one of those young punks I saw last night, then I guess maybe he’s putting things in a way that will only clench your fist harder.

At the same time, whether it’s him talking about Van Halen and Ted Nugent or the angry women who run his company. Henry has this everyman quality that makes you smile and nod. I mean, I was sitting beside some fat wench sucking boiled sweets clacking them off her teeth rubbing them about her lips and goddamn in the past and I have, I’d have turned to them and growled “Do you think I paid for this to hear you fucking slop?”. I was very close to snapping at her, had given her the glare a couple of times when she’d sucked particularly loud, yet as Henry drummed on, I found myself remarkably calmed and so ignored her.

In Henry, we have a sane (if any of us are), articulate American, putting the world in view better than any European I’ve ever heard speak. And I use European only because; I have yet to be introduced to any informer from the rest of the world doing the same schtick. He is maybe what Bill Hicks would have grown up to be. The good guy, who with his hand on his heart, unrelentingly puts it how he sees it, experiences it.

Informer – I maybe could have used Enlightener, maybe Digester. Something. Not speaker though. Because what he is, is in essence a humanist, and he is, through being a humanist, processing the world and giving us the humanist feedback.

He is a wonderful mimic and he uses it in small artful doses. His Christopher Walken is particularly excellent. He’ll leave you with the sense that, yes, this is man I could easily have stay, share a pint with, drive halfway across the city to wait with in an emergency ward.

Maybe,
Just maybe.

The truest thing I can say about Henry, is that he, with all his wry cynical humanist observations, is a good person and that in being that, he is a good human. He is the sort of human, that if other life from elsewhere visited, you’d be happy in seeing him there, at the top of the queue, hand out-stretched saying;

“Hi! I’m Henry!”